I went home this past Friday to see the wife and spend time with the family. For a brief period of time, I had my laptop out and was borrowing bandwidth from one of the neighbors. I was probably only connected 20-30 minutes, but it looks like I was infected in the process. I spent so little time on lightman that I did not notice how the computer was behaving there, but the moment I got home I knew something was wrong. Everything was moving at a crawl. I ran about every anti-virus, spyware, and rootkit program that I could find that I trusted but found nothing.
I started to expect hardware failure, which kicked me into a panic. But since I failed to detect anything software wise, it really looked like hardware might be the issue. Of course, transporting the computer back and forth, along with the heat, I would not have been too surprised. 18 hours of torture tests revealed nothing either. All signs pointed towards a perfectly working system...except that it wasn't.
While messing with all this, I was watching movies with our media box, and eventually it started acting sluggish as well. I immedietly checked my desktop and sure enough, it was affected as well. So either my network was infected while I was gone and it passed it off to my laptop (I did technically leave my computers and wifi on while gone), or I brought something back with me. Given the two options, I still think I brought something back with me. A 64 character pass phrase using only alphanumeric characters has roughly 5e+114 possible choices.
I took the time and wiped all three computers, making sure not give them any interaction that might pass whatever around before they were all wiped. I also switched up pass phrase to something else equally random. Everything seems to be running perfectly now, so I am happy.
